A new hypermarket (what is a hypermarket anyway?) or a shopping complex has been constructed right NEXT to my apartments. This is on a stretch of the road which is exceptionally prone to frequent and long traffic jams, on one of the busiest roads in Bangalore.

I am so dreading the opening of the place and even more of it being even moderately successful. The traffic to this part of the road will increase manifold and we get screwed in the process :(

Frankly, I was disappointed by Day 2. The sessions started off late as it did on Saturday but that was okay I guess. During the introduction, a lot of speakers came forward to announce what they would be talking about and frankly, I thought that it exceeded the possible time constraints as well as the space constraints. But well if it could happen, good for everyone.

The bloggers collective as expected (by me) had a large number of talks. I was skeptical about accommodating so many talks partly because the collective tended to not fragment into those interested in particular topics and not others (As in, if 2 speakers wanted to talk about different topics at the same time, they could not so that the audience does not get split). I was supposed to give a talk on micro-blogging as well.

However, once the talks started, things started getting messy because the talks would overflow and not all the talks had been alloted a time slot (including mine) I did listen to a couple of nice talks like moblogging, securing your images from being downloaded. I tried to attend a talk on Semantic web and moving towards an Internet with all data related semantically. But unfortunately I reached late so missed a significant bit of the talk.

The highlight of the day for me was a very nice discussion on bloggers getting a chance to have their posts published in the print medium to reach a wider audience. And another nice discussion with Arun Ram during lunch(it ranged from phone comparisons to egos of popular bloggers, Techcrunch, Robert Scobel etc)

The Bangalore Bloggers Meet happened. And it ROCKED. More than 40 bloggers from Bangalore, Mumbai and two from Germany (who are in Bangalore) as well as a couple of non-bloggers (journalists, short-film makers) gathered in Brew HaHa and had a blast.

For the first half an hour or so, everyone introduced themselves. And the sheer variety was impressive in itself. Once the intros were done, we ordered coffees from a good selection of delicious menu and got on with discussions on various topics.

The first point on the agenda was to decide the agenda for the Barcamp later this month. A lot of topics for discussion were decided upon during which your’s truly volunteered to give a talk on various blog platforms, and how to start up on blogging.

Then someone (with deep apologies because I forget the nameRK) gave a talk on micro-financing blogging(something which was not of my interest) while demoed Pownce to a few people. Then people discussed starting a campaign for social awareness. Lastly, just before we broke up, I floated an idea to start a site for Bangalore Bloggers where bloggers from Bangalore would contribute articles, as well as aggregated contents from all contributors would be available for reading (a la livejournal friends page)

The meeting went about an hour or so more than scheduled but I am sure no one was complaining. After the break up, some of us went down to purple haze for beer where Sanjukta ended up getting high and Snigdha wanting to dance but for the lack of a dance floor :D

The cauvery tribunal has released it’s verdict over the sharing of the water from the Cauvery River between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. This has been one of the most contentious issues between these two states, to the extent of causing extensive riots in Bangalore in 1991 and 1992. The previous order given by the tribunal was under appeal by Karnataka and it’s the tribunal issued it’s verdict today.

In it’s verdict, the tribunal has ordered Karnataka to release 419 TMCft to Tamil Nadu while Karnataka being allowed to keep up 270 TMCft. This is much lower than what Karnataka demanded and it is being said that Karnataka has received a raw deal.

As a result, riots are again expected to break out in Bangalore. Most schools and colleges have closed early and most shops are closed as well. Even we were given an early leave at work with most other IT companies asking their employees to leave early.